Your Green Funeral

Promession: Your corpse goes into a biodegradable box (recycled cardboard etc ... roughly $125 bucks bottom line) where it's frozen in liquid nitrogen - making your corpse brittle ... so now it can be vibrated into quickly biodegradable crumbs ... now your corps is all ready to make better tomatoes for your kids.





Ok, it's a tad short on pomp and circumstance ... but I still like it better than the compostinig toilets. No massive diesel backhoe digging a deep trench ... no mahogany trees or steel wasted on a fancy box. Pretty basic, and green. Anybody give it thums up?

.

There's also a trend to just putting bodies in compost. Or you can donate your body for medical harvesting/research, ie: some organ might get used, or more likely, you're used for practice by surgical students.

Unfrotunately, having heard of body-parts hijinks from medical students, that puts me off a bit. Harvesting useful organs is appealing.

Check out Tibetan sky burials. Part gross; part 'now I can fly'.

You mean green thumbs up didn't you?

Man I was all set for cremation but I suppose that will put more CO2 in the atmosphere eh? Plan B.

I've also seen the "eco burial" thing, were you are just buried in a simple cardboard box, or in nothing, under a tree, and allowed to decompose naturally.

I've always favored cremation, as using prime ground to bury huge concrete boxes in, which the coffin then goes into, has always seemed stupid. However, as spiderman mentions, then there is the CO2 to consider.

We are still discussing options at our house.

Arrr, burial at sea seems to be the leasty of impact matey.

I used to think a bonfire on the beach was the way to go. Well, after I go. But then there are still the bones to dispose of, and the fire permit, and it gets complicated. There's lots of room in the yard, but now that we have a dog, I'd be dragged back in the house in no time. I've signed up to participate in BodyWorks, a scientific program that preserves body tissues and displays them for educational purposes. I've also signed up for organ donation, so we'll see who calls first. Either way, I won't be burdening my family with a huge expense, or impacting the planet by continuing to take up space or contributing the huge amount of CO2 involved with cremation.

Still takes a bucket of energy to "create" the liquid N2. But on balance, I vote green thumb! I'm especially looking forward to the vibrating part for some reason.

Isn't CO2 a problem only if it is fired with fossil carbon, e.g. the natural gas used in commercial cremations?

What about biomass-fired cremation, such as some traditional funeral pyres? I'm thinking of limbs and branches from the forest, but available fuel will vary with locality. The idea would be to use fuel already in the atmospheric carbon cycle.

Methane from landfills might seem a useful choice to fire a crematorium, but that is better used to offset fossil gas elsewhere.

It is interesting to know think that when humans go extinct and the aliens take over one of the few things left will be our underground graves.

The aliens will think we were weird.

But if The Rapture is real, doesn't this mean you end up being Jesus's Sno-Cone?

That's what I was thinking at first, but I read that such fires aren't hot enough to burn the bones. Which leaves too much evidence and too many questions, especially where bride burning is an all-too-common practice.

i like it and organ donation is frequently un-doable even with the best of intentions.

would like to see a spec on the N2 energy/shaking process, etc. and this does smack of big business centralizing the process. little doubts here that most funeral homes could not afford the equipment to do this in-house so they would be very much against this.

playing on the holiness of spirit of the dearly departed is a powerful political tool. i think we have a very steep uphill climb on this one

what about a solar powered wood chipper. Just point, click, and chip... and Bob's your uncle.

Excellent Idea...you could even borrow some of Toyota's taglines from The Prius.

"What if you could use the Power of The Sun...to help Uncle Ernie head towards The Light?"

Alright. You're in charge of marketing. Now I need someone to head up manufacturing. Darrel, you like to make stuff. Want the job? Now we just need a name for this fantastic product.

When my time comes, I'm going to carry lots of seeds in my pockets and go lie down in the forest.

:eyebrows:

. . . and yea . . . It'd be interesting to see if/how they separate out the liquid N2 ... I'm guessing they'd re-use the nitrogen, what with catering to the environmentally conscious folks.

Diverting biomass that could better be used for transportation? If you have to go cremation, why not run a corpse over the burn-off flame on a rotisserie, above every refinery ... since thay all have to do that any way. I doubt their flame is as hot as what the crematory does.



You COULD go via a PV electric fired furnace is suppose ... THEY get REAL hot. Even if you go the "donate a corpse to UCLA research" method ... eventually THEY have to do something with it. Yea, the tomato compost seems the way to go, for us.

.

Rae Vynn reminded us of the concrete box, which stimulatd a trip to Wikipedia and some maths.

An 80-kg human (let us say corpse) will contain about 4.3 Kg carbon, and upon burning this yields 15.8 Kg CO2.

I estimate the (wall) volume of the concrete box as 1 m3, 1/6 of that cement, its density in the bag being 1.5, so 250 Kg of cement builds the box. Manufacturing that cement released about 225 Kg CO2 to the atmosphere.

So, the concrete box has more than 14x the "carbon footprint" of the flammable dear departed.

Another time we can take a stab at the fuel burn of the vehicles in the funeral procession.

I had a wood and leaf chipper before. After disabling some of its irritating safety features, and seeing a particular movie, I renamed it the "Fargo-matic"

Memories of Fargo will probably produce better market acceptance than anything relating to the most prolific recent users of this product, Uday and Qusay.

It certainly would make faster and better compost. I already have to chop up much smaller things before they go into the bin.